Salt Kiss
by Necrofeeliak
Summary: "Bits of her slip away sometimes and don't come back, running like sand through her cupped hands mixing with gravity till everything is a sandy gray and she tastes only salt." (Tamcest, CSI, SimonXRiver)


_(I wanted to just write some SimonXRiver series of drabbles in no consecutive order.)_

_Warning: This is Tamcest, CSI, SimonXRiver_

**Salt Kiss**

River is made of holes. Hundred of holes… _thousands _of holes… and bits of her slip away sometimes and don't come back, running like sand through her cupped hands mixing with gravity till everything is a sandy gray and she tastes only salt.

"Simon…" she says his name, but his room is empty. It's a_ hole._ She stands in the doorway a slow ache eating at her heart at the sight of the neatly folded linens and the carefully unwrinkled sheets. Everything tucked away, clinical, perfect. He's scrubbed the walls clean, sanitized all the surfaces, washed the floor. And it reminds her of raw skin, open and sore.

Suddenly there is no place for her here. She doesn't fit.

River leaves foggy footprints on his flawlessly polished floor, and tugs the linens from the bed. No words are coming out, only a panicked angry sound that starts in her throat but belongs nowhere.

She wants to destroy the room's fullness, tear down its empirical grandiosity and replace it with her own fragile form, trembling and needy and irrefutable. She wants to leave a River-shaped hole that Simon can never fill. But everywhere she looks she catches the gleam of his handiwork, surrounded by disinfected walls that close her in a tiny box, suffocating her till she gives up and starts to cry.

But River can't cry. No tears will come, so she chokes on the dry air and her fingers tangle in her hair.

"They've disappeared through the holes and there's nothing left!" she shrieks and her hands press over her ears.

"…Simon…" his name hurts her throat and, numbly, she climbs into the half stripped bed, hunkering close to the mattress, clinging to it, an anchor in the darkness "… simon…" she breathes into the sheets, desperately searching for the comfort of his scent, her mouth pressed to his pillow, unfolding herself till her body stretches out and she lies there, flat on her stomach.

Inside, there is a hole opening, black like a space with no stars, hungry like a bottomless ocean.

And she wishes River would die.

When he found her he didn't ask about the mess but she knew he would clean it up later in silence, after she'd gone, and the image of him bent back, his lips pressed to a single unsmiling thin line. Folding, cleaning, folding… it carved her out and left a hollowness in its wake.

_Smooth dark hair. Angles. Sad blue eyes. _It isn't an old sadness covered with old scars, like the Captain's, it is fresh and bleeding and bleeds even now as he crosses the room to her. He is wearing fall colours. They are in his vest. Leaves rolling, red and violet and golden, only leaves that didn't look like leaves at all.

"Mei mei" his soft hands brush her head and cheek and they find her tears, the tears that have slipped away.

Her cheek is pressed to his pillow. His shirt makes her feel sad and she wishes he would take it off, fold it. Fold it with his doctor's hands and make it stop hurting her.

"October threw a party, Simon… but the leaves never came. They couldn't let go." Her arm reaches out, her fingers clumsily close around his vest tugging at it, pulling him down to her. He complies with that same humoring, worrying look, till he's kneeling by the bed.

"More nightmares?" his voice is soft and dry and warm.

She doesn't answer him, she only closes her eyes tightly, holding the image of his face. _Angled, smooth, ridges. _She feels it, with the tips of her fingers. He doesn't move. He's always still for her. Simon is trapped in a societal hole with a white rabbit and a broken watch that tells him everything but the time.

River knows. River reads his body when he tucks her into bed, measures how far he leans, how often he touches her, holds her face, she feels it everywhere when he leaves, the weight of the words he can't say press down on her till she think she will drown all alone in the darkness and never be found again.

Her fingertips skim the ridge of his nose, find his lips, tracing them, memorizing them. She draws her hand back slowly, closing her fingers into a fist.

She wants to tell him what she feels but her words are broken, torn like paper in an old symbol till they don't mean anything anymore.

"Everything I have goes down the black hole. It eats and eats till I can't remember why. Leaves me with bits of my wishes and nothing else."

And Simon's face grows dark, and his eyes turn to stone, and she reads the guilt there. How much it kills him. There's a black hole there too, eating his smiles and his laughter and his dreams, leaving only her and nothing more.

She presses her closed fist to her own mouth. She has caught a little piece of his shooting star in her hand, and later she puts in under her pillow. The feel of his lips on her fingers. And she folds her bed linens and leaves them neat. Neater than Simon's.


End file.
